Every business collects and maintains private information. Oftentimes, they consist of confidential proprietary and personal information for their employees and customers. These documents should be shredded and never just left in the trash. Knowing how to dispose of confidential documents can be difficult. Using a professional commercial shredder helps to make the process easy. Destroy your sensitive business documents, maintain compliance, and make it efficient.
Protecting the sensitivity of this information is a legal requirement according to FACTA and HIPAA. Not only on a federal level but also on a local and state level. With these laws there also come steep fines for noncompliance. Besides fines, a data breach can also cripple company reputations, making a subtle, yet nonetheless significant financial impact.
The need to shred is clear but the best way to do it isn’t. With multiple factors to consider including budget, convenience, or security, some commercial shredders are better suited for different projects than others. It does not matter whether you’re shredding on a large scale or looking for an option that doesn’t cut into your work productivity. Here you can find the comparisons to help you make an informed decision on how to shred confidential documents.
Purge Shredding vs Recurring: How Often Do You Need to Dispose of Confidential Documents?
In the most general sense, there are essentially two basic types of commercial shredding services. You can choose a one-time shredding purge. Or, recurring services regularly clean out documents marked for destruction as needed. The method you choose should depend on how often your business produces confidential documents.
Below, we give you a clearer idea of their difference and what each type entails. Here are the highlights of the key considerations and advantages that come with each:
One-Time Purge Shredding
As its name implies, purge shredding is typically a one-time event where a business or organization shreds a large amount of documents all in one swoop. To handle bulk shredding, businesses have a variety of shredding services available. Options range from on-site mobile shredding to off-site shredding facilities.
With both services, we come to you to pick up documents and handle the shredding. You don’t have to waste a second of your valuable work time on document destruction.
This type is ideal for businesses that have large inventories of confidential documents but don’t necessarily need ongoing services. Shredding purges are often used as a once-a-year opportunity to shred archived documents that have passed their required retention times and are no longer necessary.
Although typically an annual event, you can request a purge service whenever there’s a large number of documents needing secure disposal. In some cases, companies also use purge shredding every quarter to help keep their document volume to a minimum and ensure sensitive information isn’t hanging around for a full year before destruction.
Regularly Scheduled Shredding
Over a year, the average office worker uses roughly 10,000 sheets of paper. This translates to 40 documents each day—a number that can quickly stack up as businesses multiply these by the number of employees working in the office.
In a single month, a business employing only 10 people will already consume 12,000 sheets of paper. With such a large number of documents, these not only eat up precious office space. They also heighten the risk for any sensitive information they contain to be stolen or misused while hanging around the office as they await shredding.
With ongoing shredding services, however, businesses are provided with locking shredding bins to safely collect the documents they have queued up for destruction. Available for weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly pickup via an off-site or mobile shredding service. These documents can be regularly cleaned out to create more space for new employees and new documents. Additionally, it ensures confidential information is immediately destroyed.
For a document management plan to be successful, documents need to be managed throughout their entire lifecycle. This includes their eventual destruction. To maintain an organized document management plan, businesses also need a well-maintained document shredding program to ensure they end on a secure note.
Comparing Ways to Dispose of Confidential Documents
Every business has its priorities to consider as they shop around ways to dispose of confidential documents. Ranging from budgetary requirements to security concerns or a need for convenience. There are several destruction service options for disposing of confidential documents, including:
Renting or Buying a Shredder
Buying or renting a paper shredder
is often one of the first options businesses and individuals will consider and ask about when it comes to safely cleaning out and throwing away confidential documents. With a standard store-bought paper shredder, however, these are typically designed for personal use. As a result, they tend to fall short of shredding needs for businesses.
During the shredding, an employee would need to go through the painstaking process of individually removing the staples and paper clips on every document just to start. Moreover, the papers also need to be shredded one at a time to avoid jams. Even then, it still isn’t a foolproof defense against jamming and further delays.
On the other hand, there are industrial shredders. They are capable of chewing through as much as 20,000 pounds of paper per hour. This power comes with significant size, however. Unfortunately, industrial shredders are far too large to fit through an office door. This is where a shredding truck comes into the picture.
A shredder built into the box truck offers a way to shred on a large scale without the complications that come with trying to buy a shredder. In other words, it provides an affordable option for renting an industrial shredder instead.
Mobile Shredding
Mobile shredding is the most secure way to shred confidential documents. It’s an innovative way to combine the power of industrial shredders with the benefits of still being able to manage shredding from your office. With mobile shredding services, a truck comes directly to your curbside to collect the documents and shred them with an onboard shredder while you watch.
The key advantage of mobile shredding stems from its security. With all mobile shredding services, businesses are provided a certificate of destruction to guarantee the destruction is HIPAA and FACTA-compliant. With mobile shredding, this can be taken one step further by businesses being able to witness the shredding themselves.
Particularly helpful for businesses who need document shredding regularly, mobile shredding provides an ideal balance of cost-efficiency and convenience. With a mobile service, it will cost, on average, $130-$175 for a project of 1-10 boxes, eliminating the cost of time, labor, and maintenance that come with buying a shredder. The price will vary depending on your location, project size, and more.
Depending on the number of documents you need to shred, some shredding services will be more fitting than others. To get a measure of how your document volume stacks up, you can use our shredding conversion calculator to help get a better estimate of how many document boxes you have to shred.
Off-Site Shredding
Let’s say you don’t need to witness the shredding. Enter off-site shredding services. It’s similar to mobile shredding services in the sense that off-site shredding offers the same convenience of having a provider come out to your business to pick up documents for you. The only real difference is they shred the documents at an off-site facility instead—in turn lowering the cost of service.
While there isn’t the opportunity to witness the shredding, no privacy laws require it. It’s just that some feel more comfortable doing so. Businesses are still provided a certificate of destruction for compliance with shredding laws and to ensure a secure chain of custody throughout destruction.
When businesses are looking for purge shredding, off-site shredding services can handle these large-scale needs. Since the trucks don’t need to stay on-site to shred the documents, it’s usually cheaper than mobile shredding. The time this saves for the provider translates to money saved by the customer.
Know How to Dispose of Confidential Documents With Shred Nations Today!
There are a range of confidential shredding options available to businesses and companies. However, there is also often a range of needs and requirements individual organizations have for their document destruction.
At Shred Nations, we partner with a nationwide network of top shredding providers. We specialize in connecting businesses with the right shredding services to suit any schedule or budget. Start protecting your confidential documents today. Call us at (800) 747-3365, or fill out the form for free quotes from local providers in your area.
